Qualification

Rapita Systems provides high-quality documentation and tests to support the qualification of RVS tools for use in DO-178B/C (up to and including DAL A) and ISO 26262 projects. These reduce the cost of qualifying the RVS tools by reducing the need for manual analysis.

Qualified target integration kits describe the integration of RVS tools into a development environment, and include on-site tests and expected results. These can be provided as a service if we already integrated RVS into your development environment.

Tool qualification provides evidence that the software you’re using doesn’t introduce or fail to detect errors in your software when it is being used within your project. If you’re working in the context of safety standards such as DO-178 or ISO 26262, you need to provide this evidence if the tool you’re using automates or replaces a manual process and you aren't manually reviewing output from the tool.

If you want qualification support for using an RVS tool in a safety context, and we don’t already offer a qualification kit for this combination, we’d be happy to hear from you to discuss extending our support. Contact us for more information.

We follow the DO-330/ED-215 guidance for qualification of a COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) tool. Per these standards, a tool vendor cannot provide all of the evidence needed for tool qualification – some of it must be provided by the tool user.

Our qualified target integration kit includes all of the DO-330 tool developer items, as well as documentation and effort to help you to complete DO-330 tool user items.

his includes generic documents, on-site tests and expected results that help you produce a large proportion of the evidence you need for qualification, including all of the documentation that needs to be provided by the tool vendor (us). In addition to what we provide, you will need to run on-site tests, check results against a list of expected results, and produce some documents, such as the user Tool Operation Requirements, yourself. We can provide help with this.

The length of the tool qualification process varies depending on the complexity of your project and integration.

If you take advantage or our full qualification package (qualified target integration kit), then we start producing qualification material for you after we have agreed together to freeze your integration. This typically takes at least two weeks. If we think that we will need more time because of the complexity of the integration, we will discuss timeframes with you beforehand.

Producing qualification material for your target integration may be an iterative process. The two-week timeframe is especially relevant for the first iteration. Any further iterations are likely to take much less time.

We use flexible tool components and custom integrations to maximize the efficiency of our tools and their compatibility with a wide range of targets and test environments. The price of this flexibility is additional tool qualification work. We’ve split our qualification kit into two parts – one for the flexible tool components and one for the custom integration – and we’ve done everything we can to reduce the effort involved in the custom part.

Licenses for our qualification kits are valid for a specific version of the RVS tools you’re using, a specific integration of those tools into your development environment, and a specific customer project.

Please contact us if you need to use our qualification kits in multiple projects, or projects with multiple certifications.

If you make a change to the RVS tool version or integration of RVS into your development environment after we have produced qualification materials, we will need to reproduce those materials, which will incur extra costs.

We regularly announce tool bugs that could affect existing integrations, when those bugs affect the assurance of the tool output. This includes false positives, missed code constructs (for coverage analysis) and unwanted functional changes to the software under test. We provide advice, workarounds and fix schedules for all assurance issues that we publish this way.

We’ll run the bug through our usual problem reporting, triage and assurance issue analysis processes. If you cannot use a workaround, we can provide add-on fixes or new wavefront versions of the tool that fix your issue, depending on your needs.

If it’s a genuine mistake, we can issue an addendum report or reissue the kit, as appropriate. If you need a different scope or level of information, that can be accommodated but requires more effort. For more information, contact us.

We offer a frozen version support service for qualified RVS integrations, so you can rest assured that you will have access to the version of RVS you're qualifying even if your project has a very long life cycle.